Thin End of the Wedge
Thin End of the Wedge
73. Zoltán Niederreiter, Erika Roboz: Kingdom of Gods and Demons
Zoltán and Erika introduce us to their exhibition about gods and demons. This exhibition, and the extensive catalogue that accompanies it, are major landmarks in Hungarian assyriology. What is it about, how did it become a reality, and what impact will it have?
2:40 the exhibition
8:11 key objects
10:47 why this topic, and why now?
12:56 reaction
15:15 preparing an exhibition
21:19 about the displays
23:19 significance for Hungary
24:52 the museum's own collection
27:45 favourite object
https://www.mfab.hu/exhibitions/kingdom-of-gods-and-demons-mesopotamia-1000-500-bce/
Music by Ruba Hillawi
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Hello, and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon. Each episode, I talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand. Special exhibitions provide important opportunities for Assyriology to raise awareness and generate interest. There are impressive permanent displays in the big international museums, and often also interesting displays in museums with smaller collections. But exhibitions work differently. They come with a brief but intense injection of funds, an opportunity to display in a custom environment, test new techniques, and attract press and public attention. Right now there is a major exhibition in Budapest dedicated to the gods and demons of Mesopotamia. It brings together loans of spectacular objects from across Europe. This is the first large-scale exhibition on Mesopotamia in Hungary. Alongside it comes a catalogue with essays from international scholars in Hungarian; the first assyriological publication in Hungarian in 20 years. Our guests are the co-curators of this exhibition. They explain how the exhibition came to about, what it took it make it happen, what its impact has been, and what its legacy will be. Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
Zoltan Niederreiter:Hi Jon, thank you for this kind invitation.
Erika Roboz:And also we welcome everybody who is listening to us now.
Jon Taylor:Could you tell us please: who are you, and what do you do?
Zoltan Niederreiter:I'm Zoltán Niederreiter, Professor of the University of Budapest. I teach assyriology and archaeology. And I'm the curator of the temporary exhibition organised in Budapest.
Erika Roboz:Hello. My name is Erika Roboz. And I am a staff member of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. I am the co- curator of the current exhibition, what is the topic is today. and I am a historian.
Jon Taylor:Okay, can you start us off then with the basics? What is the exhibition called, and what is it about?
Zoltan Niederreiter:The exhibition, "Mesopotamia, kingdom of gods and demons", is the result of a joint effort by the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest and the momentum research project of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The four months temporary exhibition focuses on ancient Mesopotamia, primarily the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods. Gods, demons and hybrid creatures are the protagonists of the exhibition. They are presented through written, pictorial, and material sources. We aim to display the Mesopotamian heritage focusing on the divine world. A well-developed concept was important, in which we wanted to evoke the divine figures in nine sections. Jon, please let me know whether I can present briefly the nine sections now.
Jon Taylor:Yes, please do. What are the sections, please?
Zoltan Niederreiter:Okay. The first concentrates on the archaeological discovery of Babylon, primarily the Ishtar Gate. The second looks at the various activities, gods and ceremonies, campaigns, hunts of the kings chosen by the gods to provide for them and serve them. The third section presents the stones used as raw materials, their mythical origins, and the cylinder seals made for them. The seal images depict the wild animals and hybrid creatures and the divine and supernatural figures. Which led us to our next topic, the divine world. This includes the various Mesopotamian myths beginning with the creation of the world, birth of the gods, and their struggles. Here we also present the astral gods, Sin, Shamash, and Ishtar, and the zodiac. Then we present the next layer of the sky, where Adad the weather god appears. Then on this journey, we go further down and arrive in our world, where we have summoned a house and its inhabitants. Here we focus on the demonic world, primarily on the two most important demons, Pazuzu and Lamashtu. We try to present the impact the demons have on humans when they appear in the different spheres. We present the role of the gods and demons in the individual life of the people of ancient Mesopotamia from birth to death, focusing on everyday activities and the home. Next section evokes the Assyrian palaces through palace reliefs depicting divine beings. Our concept was that at the end of the exhibition, visitors could return to Babylon, where they started from. But here, at the end, they would not see the discovery of Babylon, but its heyday, that is the capital of the neo-Babylonian empire. Through the amulets, rituals, prayers, hymns, we introduce Marduk, the city's chief god, his temple, and Mushhushshu, the snake-dragon, who was assigned to his service. This foreshadows the last topic, which examines the Tower of Babel, the famous ziggurat, the stepped temple tower, described by the Bible. Its imagery lives on as topos in the paintings and graphic art of the late 16th century Low Countries and 20th century Hungary. We hope that the exhibition brings the heritage of ancient Mesopotamia closer to the Hungarian public and to international visitors. At the same time, we aim to enrich the research in assyriology and on the art and archaeology of ancient Mesopotamia by presenting the world of gods and demons, focusing primarily on Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian sources.
Erika Roboz:An extra closing section is attached to the exhibition, which presents two iconic Mesopotamian motifs appearing in the today's visual and popular culture, especially focusing to the world of cinema. The one is the figure of the demon Pazuzu, and another is the famous city of Babylon, which we present via movie short cuts. For example, we show scenes projecting on the walls of this room from the American horror movie entitled "The Exorcist", from 1973 directed by William Friedkin, and from the German expressionist silent Sci-Fi entitled "Metropolis", directed by Fritz Lang from 1927.
Jon Taylor:Okay, thank you. So you explained a little bit there about the sections and the topics you're covering in each.Now obviously, those stories have to be told through objects. And usually there's a key object in each of the sections. Could you maybe say something about some of the most important objects you have in the exhibition?
Erika Roboz:The nine sections features one highlight object, or a group of objects, which are the key objects. These have been selected for their higher artistic and/or aesthetic value, but often for their size to represent the theme of the section that attracts the eye. So in the first section, there is a glazed brick relief panel of a lion from the processional way of Babylon. In the second section, there is a kudurru of Bel-ahhe-eriba, the governor of Babylon, is the highlight object. In the third section, there is an Achaemenid glazed brick relief panel depicting two human-faced winged sphinxes from Susa. In the fourth section, there is a basalt stela from Arslantash. Fifth section, there are three unbaked clay figurines of two bull-men and a lion-demon from Dur-sharrukin. In the sixth section, there is the famous"Heil-plaque", a Lamashtu emulet from the Louvre collection. In the seventh section, a palace relief depicting a bird-headed Apkallu before a stylised tree from Kalhu from the collection of the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, with its weight of more than one tons, and with its size of almost two metres high. In the eighth section, there is a glazed brick relief panel of a Mushhushshu from the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. And in the ninth section, dealing with the motif of the Tower of Babel, there is an oil painting from an unknown Flemish painter of the 16th century depicting the Tower of Babel motif from the old masters collection of our museum. The other artworks in this room also are from fine art collections representing the artistic appearances of this motif in the European and Hungarian art.
Jon Taylor:Mm-hmm. Exhibitions tend to be quite a lot of work. Obviously, there's the limited number of exhibitions that can be put on, so why this particular subject and why now?
Zoltan Niederreiter:The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest regularly hosts temporary exhibitions, mostly of painting. The Director General of the museum has supported the plan for this ancient Mesopotamian exhibition from the very beginning. The presentation of the ancient Mesopotamian heritage in an exhibition was timely. Ancient Mesopotamian culture and civilisation has been much talked about in recent years. I'm thinking here of the destruction of the Mesopotamian heritage in Iraq. Not only the archaeologists and assyriologists, but also the general public are aware of this. Unfortunately, this has meant the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003 and the destruction of the archaeological sites and monuments around Mosul in 2014. In addition, a number of looting operations have taken place in Iraq over the years, resulting in objects being destroyed without documentation or being trafficked illegally. Now, visitors to the exhibition can discover another side of this civilisation. And there is another really important and actual situation, in the case of us. Since, in the framework of the five year momentum project of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, I'm researching the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian divine world. The main objective of the project included the organisation of the temporary exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts. It was this project that gave rise to this exhibition, and invited Erika to organise this temporary exhibition.
Jon Taylor:And what has the reaction of the audience been to your exhibition so far?
Erika Roboz:The exhibition opened on the fourth of October this year and will be open until the second day of February 2025. it immediately received a very good media impact and appeared
on different platforms:press, online and TV in Hungary. After two months open and before Christmas, we have nearly 40,000 of visitors now. There is a great interest in this topic from the public, and we are getting excellent feedbacks, as this is the first large-scale exhibition on Mesopotamia in our country. So it has the power of novelty in Hungary. Mainly, our temporary exhibitions in the museum, as Zoltán mentioned, are focusing on fine arts, but the archaeological exhibitions dedicated to ancient art are usually very popular, because of their rarity. So now we are presenting an ancient culture for the first time, from this aspect, dealing with the divine, which showing object types that will give many of our visitors a completely new experience in ancient art.
Zoltan Niederreiter:It is important to mention that many school groups come and the exhibition offers them interesting things from a historical, religious, literary and artistic perspective. During the preparations, the question of how the exhibition would be received and how many people would come to see it often arose. For the museum staff, this must have been timely, because the museum has been organising temporary exhibitions year after year for the last 20 years. They are preceded by anticipation and a great deal of interest in Hungary, especially in Budapest. And I think we managed to present now another angle, another aspect of the civilisations. So the ancient Mesopotamia, this exhibition was really timely.
Jon Taylor:With an exhibition on this kind of scale, what does it take? I mean, how long did it take to prepare this and what did it involve? What did you have to do to turn this from an idea into a reality?
Zoltan Niederreiter:In November 2021, three years before the opening of the exhibition, we contacted the museum's Director General. We tried to convince him of the interest and importance of this exhibition. We needed to find objects for loan that would be inviting, eye-catching and exciting for visitors. We focused on European museum collections. Museums in England and the United States were excluded, because of the high costs. Over the past 15 years, I have been researching ancient Mesopotamian objects in several European museums. The curators whom I approached with the concept of the exhibition and the loan of the objects, liked the fact that the planned exhibition focused on a specific theme and period. They found the theme of our exhibition interesting and supported it from the beginning. During the selection of the objects to loan, particular emphasis was placed on finds from the capitals of Assyria: Ashur, Dur-sharrukin and Kalhu, and from Babylon. Since these objects were excavated in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. And I have been working with Mathilde Avisseau Brustet the curator of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France for years. Thanks to her, we have been able to loan over 90 objects for the exhibition. These are small objects, but include unpublished objects and objects that have not yet been loaned. The clay statues from Dur-sharrukin are the first to leave the Bibliothèque Nationale de France since they arrived in Paris. In addition several amulets and cylinder seals arrived that had previously been unpublished. Ariane Thomas, the chief curator of the Louvre also mentioned that the glazed brick panel from Susa was the first to be exhibited outside Paris. So I started discussions with the curators of European museums in 2022. the list of objects to be loaned was completed in six months. The sections of the exhibition and the main themes were developed in the second half of 2022. And in April 2023, a year and a half before the opening of the exhibition, the director of the museum indicated that the museum would be able to host the exhibition. So three years into the epidemic and then economic problems, many questions have arisen. This influenced the list of objects to be loaned and the size of the exhibition, as well as the choice of space for the exhibition. Finally, this exhibition was also held in a selected area of the museum for large exhibitions. The exhibition covers an area of 1400 square metres. From May 2023, I also had to focus on the exhibition catalogue. I asked five Hungarian and 17 foreign contributors to write short essays. Colleagues, museum researchers, and professors wrote one or more short essays. It is very important to say that they undertook this work at my first request. Once the manuscripts arrived, we had nine months with three assistant editors, Erika Roboz, Mónika Nyitrai, and András Bácskay, to translate the studies, to prepare my own studies and most of the catalogue entries. In the end, they published a 500 page exhibition catalogue in English and a similar one in Hungarian. No volume on ancient Mesopotamia has been published in our country in the past 20 years. So we hope that this will be popular. It is important to mention that we also want to enrich a assyriological, archaeological, religious history and art research with this volume. For me, the biggest task in the last year was the exhibition catalogue. I invited the contributors to a workshop, where we had lectures on the theme of the divine world, and visited the exhibition together.
Jon Taylor:Yes, thank you very much. I enjoyed it. It was a lovely exhibition. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Erika Roboz:It is important to mention that Zoltán had a former and stable professional relationship with the curators of the loaning collections, which greatly helped to acquire the exhibited objects. These valuable relationships that have allowed us to get permission to make our special ideas. For example, to display a bronze Pazuzu head amulet with a loop on its top from the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, using an installation method which is imitating the hanging of the object.
Zoltan Niederreiter:So we can mention further examples concerning the display of the object. If you are interested?
Jon Taylor:Yes, why not? Please carry on.
Zoltan Niederreiter:For example, a visitor can view the minerals alongside the cylinder seals, in addition to the raw materials. And at the same time, visitor can see how modern seal impressions are made, as well as how we document, photograph and create illustrations of them. Next to the cylinder seals depicting wildlife, there are photographs of wild animals of the Middle East. And we show the wild animals that make up Mushhushshu, the snake dragon. In the case of astral gods, stars and constellations, a photograph of the night sky is accompanied by a lapis lazuli, which the Mesopotamians believed resembled the starry night sky through its pyrite inclusions. On the subject of the zodiac, next to microzodiac cuneiform tablet from the Hellenistic Uruk, the visitor can see Albrecht Durer's famous work, the celestial map of the Northern Hemisphere, depicting the zodiac and the dial of St Mark's clock tower in Venice, with its golden constellations on a lazurite background. So these are interesting examples concerning the presentation of the ancient object with the new ones, or the wild animals, etc.
Jon Taylor:Yes, thank you. I particularly enjoyed the presentation of the raw materials with the cylinder seals. I think that was a very good way to display that kind of material. It's very difficult to display seals in a way that makes it interesting for visitors. I thought that was very impressive.
Zoltan Niederreiter:Thank you.
Jon Taylor:I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about the Hungarian context of this. So you mentioned that it was the first major display on Mesopotamia in Hungary, and that it has a certain novelty value. But could you say something more about its importance? What do you think its legacy will be?
Erika Roboz:For the first time, our museum is presenting a temporary exhibition on ancient Mesopotamia. The public can see objects from several well-known European collections in one place, in Budapest. The special feature of the exhibition is that it is based on an ongoing research, so visitors will also be able to discover new results and aspects on this topic. Besides, visitors can also read about the Mesopotamian divine world by foreign authors who are published in Hungarian for the first time in our exhibition catalogue. Previously in Hungary in 1968 a traveling exhibition on Mesopotamia was organised in the Kunsthalle, the museum building opposite our museum on the Heroes' Square in Budapest, which was opened for just a few weeks, and presented the selected object material from the Iraq museum. So we can say that our exhibition is the first in our country in terms of its scale and the subject focusing to the divine world.
Jon Taylor:Mm, hmm. Finally, could we turn then to the museum itself? Because the museum has a collection of its own, doesn't it? So it's not just the materials that you were borrowing for the temporary exhibition. Could you say something about the permanent displays that you have in the museum, please, and the collection there?
Erika Roboz:Yes, sure. Zoltan, do you start?
Zoltan Niederreiter:For decades, the ancient Near Eastern material kept in the Museum of Fine Arts had not been exhibited in the museum. In 2013, I managed to exhibit the main objects of this material in a showcase. The small exhibition was the result of an agreement with the head of the Egyptian antiquities. Since 2018 the material is on display in a larger showcase in the permanent exhibition, which I have already arranged with Erika. It was a challenge and an experience for us, which we could then use in the preparation of this exhibition.
Erika Roboz:The ancient Middle Eastern object material is the part of the Egyptian collection in our museum, which forms a separate unit within the main collection. The objects have been acquired mainly from various private collections through museum purchases or as donations. So most of the objects came from different periods of Mesopotamia, Iran, and Anatolia, which gives a diverse picture of the material. The less than 200 objects can be separated to four main object types, the majority of which are 29 cylinder seals and also stamp seals. The ultimately 100 artifacts, glyptic represents then half of the object material, which makes it the most relevant part of this collection unit. The smaller part of this unit includes bronze objects from various periods, as well as cuneiform documents, for example, Sumerian clay tablets--11 Sumerian clay tablets--and nine Sumerian and Neo-Babylonian stamped bricks. And we have other clay objects also. For example, late Uruk mosaic cones and fertility idols from the Middle Bronze Age Turkmenistan. The earliest date object group are mosaic cones from the late Uruk period, and the latest date objects are the Sassanid gems dating back to the third to the seventh century AD.
Jon Taylor:Okay, super. Thank you. Do you have a favourite object from the exhibition?
Zoltan Niederreiter:This object is the glazed brick representation of Mushhushshu, the snake-dragon, which is on display in our exhibition. This object comes from the Glyptotek in Copenhagen, and has become the emblematic figure of the exhibition. It adorned the Ishtar Gate, which stood in Babylon, perhaps one of the largest cities in the world at the time. It must have fascinated the inhabitants and the visitors of the city. Over time, much of the Ishtar Gate collapsed and was buried underground. However, over time, much of the Ishtar Gate collapsed and was buried underground. Centuries later, Babylon was forgotten by mankind. The deep blue glazed bricks lay worthless on the ground or underground. The German archaeologists, Robert Koldewey and Walter Andrae, after excavating the Ishtar Gate, were able to identify its architectural decoration. Initially, they recognised the decoration of the early phase, which had been preserved in situ and can still be seen in Babylon. They then realised that the tiny fragments of glazed brick could be used to assemble the figures, and even rebuilt the entrance of the Ishtar Gate in Berlin, based on Walter Andrae's designs. This example shows how a forgotten object can regain its former value, and wonder.
Erika Roboz:My favorite object is the "Heil-plaque", what is a Lamashtu amulet made from bronze from the collection of the Louvre This is a famous piece representing the demonic world of Mesopotamia. It illustrates well what the complexity of beliefs about the demons meant to the ancient people.
Jon Taylor:Hmm, okay. Well, thank you both very much.
Erika Roboz:Thank you.
Zoltan Niederreiter:Thank you so much. We are grateful for this kind invitation.
Jon Taylor:I’d also like to thank our patrons: Enrique Jiménez, Jana Matuszak, Nancy Highcock, Jay C, Rune Rattenborg, Woodthrush, Elisa Rossberger, Mark Weeden, Jordi Mon Companys, Thomas Bolin, Joan Porter MacIver, John MacGinnis, Andrew George, Yelena Rakic, Zach Rubin, Sabina Franke, Shai Gordin, Aaron Macks, Maarja Seire, Jaafar Jotheri, Morgan Hite, Chikako Watanabe, Mark McElwaine, Jonathan Blanchard Smith, Kliment Ohr, Christina Tsouparopoulou, TT, Melanie Gross, Claire Weir, Marc Veldman, Bruno Biermann, Faimon Roberts, Jason Moser, Pavla Rosenstein, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Tate Paulette, Willis Monroe, Toby Wickenden, Emmert Clevenstine, Barbara Porter, Cheryl Morgan, Kevin Roy Jackson, Susannah Paulus, Eric Whitacre, Jakob Flygare, Jon Ganuza, Bonnie Nilhamn-Kuosmanen, Ben, Michael Gitlin, Janet Evans Houser, Baladitya Yellapragada, as well as those who prefer to remain anonymous. I really appreciate your support. It makes a big difference. Every penny received has contributed towards translations. Thanks of course to the lovely people who have worked on the translations on a voluntary basis or for well below the market rate. For Arabic, thanks in particular to Zainab Mizyidawi, as well as Lina Meerchyad and May Al-Aseel. For Turkish, thank you to Pinar Durgun and Nesrin Akan. TEW is still young, but I want to reach a sustainable level, where translators are given proper compensation for their hard work. And thank you for listening to Thin End of the Wedge. If you enjoy what we do, and you would like to help make these podcasts available in Middle Eastern languages, please consider joining our Patreon family. You can find us at patreon.com/wedgepod. You can also support us in other ways: simply subscribe to the podcast; leave us a five star review on Apple Music or your favourite podcatcher; recommend us to your friends. If you want the latest podcast news, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can find all the links in the show notes and on our website at wedgepod.org. Thanks, and I hope you’ll join us next time.